Gaming machines, such as slot machines, video poker machines and the like, have been a cornerstone of the gaming industry for several years. Generally, the popularity of such machines with players is dependent on the likelihood (or perceived likelihood) of winning money at the machine and the intrinsic entertainment value of the machine relative to other available gaming options. Where the available gaming options include a number of competing machines and the expectation of winning at each machine is roughly the same (or believed to be the same), players are likely to be attracted to the most entertaining and exciting machines. Shrewd operators consequently strive to employ the most entertaining and exciting machines, features, and enhancements available because such machines attract frequent play and hence increase profitability to the operator. Therefore, there is a continuing need for gaming machine manufacturers to continuously develop new games and improved gaming enhancements that will attract frequent play through enhanced entertainment value to the player. There is also a continuing need for gaming machines to become more efficient and improve the time it takes to become fully operational and operate without further problems in response to errors and/or failure of one or more components.
Power cycling is the act of turning a piece of electronic equipment off (terminating power supplied to the equipment) and then back on again (returning power supplied to the equipment). Reasons for power cycling may include requiring an electronic device to reinitialize configuration to a given default or expected state, recover from an unresponsive state of one or more components of the system (e.g., a non-responsive component or memory device, or a system hang or crash), or reboot after a memory alteration, software installation procedure, or other configuration change. When a central processing unit or central processing unit baseboard of a gaming machine requires a “cold boot” (i.e., a total central processing unit system reset caused by removal of power to the central processing unit and connected board), it is typically necessary to power down the entire gaming machine cabinet, either by manually using a main power switch controlling power which enters the gaming machine, physically pulling the plug from the outlet, or interacting in some other physical way with the gaming machine to effect a power down and subsequent repowering. For these reasons, power cycling is often performed manually, requiring physical interaction with the equipment by a technician or other human being. These methods have undesirable side effects of requiring physical interaction with the equipment. Additionally, severing all power to the gaming machine cabinet and powering down components (and peripherals) which will be unnecessarily rebooted and reinitialized increases time and complication to an otherwise simplified power cycling procedure.
Therefore, there is need in the art for a gaming machine to selectively power cycle the central processing unit (and the entire central processing unit baseboard) of the gaming machine without disrupting or resetting other system components and peripherals of the controlled gaming machine, initiated by instruction of software (i.e., the operating system), and independently managing the power cycling process by hardware once the power cycling has been initiated.
There is also need in the art for a gaming machine to selectively power cycle specific components of the central processing unit baseboard of the gaming machine without physical manipulation of switches or other components on the gaming machine. One embodiment of the invention obviates the need for a technician to turn off (and turn back on) the gaming machine, unplug (and re-plug) the gaming machine, otherwise physically interact with, or be in proximity to the gaming machine. The ability to initiate and execute power cycling of the gaming machine central processing unit baseboard, central processing units, and/or components coupled to baseboard voltage controller(s) in highly desirable.